Susan's Reflections
One-Shot
Susan ran the silver brush she had gotten here in America from a potential suitor through her hair once more, turning away with a sigh from the browned letter. Her hair was silky smooth now, but she had been brushing it for the last half hour, not wanting to read the letter but knowing she must sometime.
The young man who had given her the hairbrush was no one she had the intention of marrying, but he was very handsome and seemed to delight in showering gifts upon her.
For her part, Susan didn't particularly mind. It was a lovely hairbrush, and probably cost him a lot of money, but he showered such gifts on every girl he liked, if her new American friends were to be believed.
The envelope to Susan and Lucy's letter lay on the ground beneath her bed, a dozen stamps across it. It bore witness to the hasty way she had ripped open the note in her attempt to reach the letter.
It was nearly midnight now, and Susan had just returned from an outing with her parents. Oh, how she wished Lucy were here! The girl would love the lavish dresses and feasts. They would remind her of...
No, Susan wasn't going to think of that.
It was her second letter from Edmund and Lucy since they had been separated so far. Technically the first from Edmund, though she was not blind and she knew it was her sister's handwriting.
Dearest Susan, the letter began, We hope this finds you, father and mother well. Aunt and Uncle are just as bad as Peter described them. Eustace was even worse. Susan blinked at that. What on earth did that mean? Had their cousin died in the short time since Lucy's last letter? Surely she would have mentioned he was ill.
Setting aside her hairbrush in concern, Susan held the letter a little closer, scanning it. The candle by her bedside suddenly flickered and went out.
Irritated, Susan sat up, pulling out the box of matches in the small drawer of her bedside table and, with a slightly shaking hand, re-lit the candle. The flame choked for a moment, and she was afraid it would burn out, but then it sputtered to life and she returned to her letter, squinting at it in the near-darkness of her room.
Edmund and I have news, and it simply cannot wait. We knew you'd be thrilled to find out, and we had to let you and Peter know before you came home. Susan, we found Narnia again! Or rather, it found us.
Susan swallowed hard, setting the letter aside in that moment and debating whether or not to continue reading it. Narnia! She couldn't believe it! Edmund and Lucy were still at their childish game. She would have thought they had grown out of it by now, given the time they'd been apart.
Biting her lip, Susan turned back to the letter.
We know you in particular have begun forgetting Narnia, because you're growing up. We were hoping this would remind you. Susan, we were with Caspian, floating on a ship called the Dawn Treader to the Edge of the World. Reep was there, too, and we went to the Lone Islands, and beyond! Eustace even came with us this time, and it changed him so much, Edmund would like you to know. He's much more tolerable now.
Susan set the letter down on the bed sheets this time, unable to read more. She swallowed hard past the sudden, unexplainable lump in her throat and folded the letter up, placing it underneath her pillow.
No, she had not forgotten Narnia, as her siblings assumed. She remembered the children's game they had hatched when they were younger, when, out of sheer boredom at the professor's home, they had nothing else to do. It was her siblings that had forgotten; forgotten it was a simple fantasy, nothing more.
Somewhere in her adolescence, as the desire to be normal and to fit in with other girls her age out won her love of their Narnian stories, Susan had lost sight of why their imagined game was so important. Boys started coming to the house, asking if they could court the young "Miss Pevensie," or, at the very least, escort her to wherever it was she was headed, and Susan found herself enjoying that. Enjoying it more than sitting at home reminiscing about children's stories, as her siblings preferred to do.
For some reason she didn't pretend to fathom, they refused to give it up, even knowing how strange they sounded to everyone around them when they brought up the "world inside the wardrobe."
Logically, as they should have learned in school long ago, the idea of a make-believe world where they could travel to by stepping inside a wardrobe, a world where animals talked and there was eternal winter, was ludicrous. The harmless imaginings of lonely children wanting to have a hero they could see at that moment, not one off to war who might not return.
They had no control over their childhood situations, so they had made up one that they could control. A world where they were kings and queens and good always defeated evil.
Did none of her siblings realize this but her?
She had tried to explain all this to Peter once, Peter who should have at least been sensible enough to believe her, at his age. She supposed she and Peter were still pretending along with the younger ones at the age Edmund and Lucy were now.
The words still stung.
"I'm going to miss Narnia. Caspian, and all of them. I wish there was another way, a way we could return-"
"Peter, stop this nonsense! Narnia wasn't a real place; you know that." She glanced up from her spot at the window, where she had been waiting for her newest suitor to come and pick her up. Incidentally, it was the boy she had met from Hendon House.
She had thought they would marry. He was a sweet boy, if a bit clumsy, and she once thought she loved him.
"I know no such thing," Peter insisted stubbornly, and Susan fought the urge to roll her eyes.
"It was a fantasy we all thought up during the war, Peter. It's nothing to be ashamed of; children do that sort of thing all the time, and that was a horrid time for us. We'd just been separated from our mother, we didn't know if we would ever see our father again, and the bombings almost killed us before we were sent to the Professor's home. But that's all right, for a child. They think up their own little worlds so they don't have to deal with the harsh world around them. But then they grow up!" She didn't realize she was shouting the last words.
Peter's eyes flashed in annoyance. "If it was all a game, then why do we all have the same memories from it? Vivid memories that we agree on? We lived through almost a lifetime there, Su! Why can't you remember that?"
Susan swallowed. "Because we thought it up together, Peter. But I, for one, prefer not to cling to childish fantasies when the world isn't quite so bad anymore. The war's over Peter, and our parents are fine. And Narnia isn't real!" She stalked away from him then, seeing her friend from Hendon House down in the street below, waiting on her.
A part of her, she knew now, was furious that she had been the first to give up Narnia.
Edmund had walked out into the hallway then, a horrified expression on his face as he heard the last of her words. And truly, they were the only ones he needed to have heard to have that look.
Oh, they were frustrating, the lot of them!
It should have been the oldest, her mind was telling her. Why couldn't Peter have lost faith in their childish games first?
That truly bothered her, even now. Why was she the only one willing to see beyond their childish game?
"What about Aslan?" Edmund threw at her turned back, and she paused. She was glad that they could not see her face then; could not see the guilt etched across it.
"Aslan was just a figment of our imagination, Ed," she whispered hoarsely, not daring to turn around. "Just like Caspian, the White Witch, and the rest of them. We needed a hero, and so there was Aslan. But now it's time to face the real world, Peter. None of them are real," the roundabout way of saying it made her feel better, at least. Whenever she talked about Aslan no longer being real, some part of her ached with guilt.
"We don't have a war to hide from anymore. Mum and father didn't die, and we're all together again, at least for now. Please, just give it up, boys! It was fun while we needed it." She replaced her pearl earrings.
Peter looked ready to protest once more, but Edmund placed a hand on his arm, shaking his head, almost imperceptibly.
Then Susan was gone, down the hallway and away, and she didn't hear the rest of their words. They never bothered her about Narnia again, after that, and she was grateful to whatever Edmund's words had been about the subject.
As long as they kept Narnia to themselves, her three siblings, she could pretend they had given up their hopeless daydreams of Narnia and grown up, as well.
She remembered Lucy trying to reason with her another time, before that.
"Do you remember, when we were in Narnia, and we forgot about our lives back here?" she persisted, pulling Susan's crochet out of her hands so that she was forced to listen.
"No, because we were never in Narnia, Lucy," Susan snapped, trying to take back her needlework, but Lucy held it just out of reach.
"All right then," Lucy sighed. "We were never in Narnia. It was just a game we played in the upstairs wardrobe because it seemed like a good place to hide and whisper stories," she sounded weary. "But in those stories, don't you remember? We were there many, many years and we forgot about our lives back here. Forgot about our mother and father and the war..."
Susan stiffened at this, and Lucy counted that as a victory.
"So maybe this is like that. Maybe you're forgetting about Narnia, like we forgot about this world. Maybe you've just been here too long, without enough to remind you."
"Then wouldn't Peter be forgetting too?" Susan pointed out the flaw in her theory, turning to her hair in a vain attempt to do something, now that her crocheting had been confiscated. She had a dance to go to tonight, invited by one of the boys at Hendon House, and she intended to look her best for it.
Lucy had been invited as well, but her stubborn little sister didn't care about dances, she had informed Susan earlier. She didn't care about standing around, flirting and trying to impress boys.
The dances had never been like that in Narnia. In Narnia, they were always fun, fawns and dryads making it so. No one stood around worrying about their hair or how much they ate that night.
Perhaps she should start getting ready now. The idea was certainly more appealing than sitting here listening to Lucy ramble about their make-believe world.
Narnia. What a silly name for a silly game about an imagined country!
The letter sat untouched by Susan's pillow, and she scooped it back up, unable to leave it a moment longer. She just wanted to finish the thing and go to sleep.
Aslan told us we can't go back anymore; we're too old now. We hope you remember soon, but we're not going to keep bothering you about Narnia if you can't. We love you, Su. Aslan's Blessings.
Edmund and Lucy.
Tears filled her eyes then, tears she couldn't explain, and the letter was torn in two, the pieces flying out over her blanket. She watched them flutter to a rest silently, and then buried her head in her pillow and tried to sleep.
But sleep alluded her that night.
Her siblings were wrong.
It wasn't that she could no longer remember Narnia. It was that she chose not to, putting it from her mind because she didn't want to remember Narnia anymore. Remembering Narnia was painful, because what was the use? They could never go back; even in their games they had decided that. And those games only made her feel separated from the real world, as if she were an observer and not really part of it.
She was sick of feeling like that, and when she had chosen to forget Narnia, all that had changed. She was finally getting used to life in the real world.
And in doing so, she felt as if she had somehow sold her soul.
Which was silly, because there were plenty of other people who had never been to Narnia, and they were perfectly all right with that.
Fin.
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